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The Raid-Proof Hosting Technology Behind 'The Pirate Bay'
HughPickens.com writes Ernesto reports at TorrentFreak that despite its massive presence the Pirate Bay doesn't have a giant server park but operates from the cloud, on virtual machines that can be quickly moved if needed. The site uses 21 "virtual machines" (VMs) hosted at different providers, up four machines from two years ago, in part due to the steady increase in traffic. Eight of the VMs are used for serving the web pages, searches take up another six machines, and the site's database currently runs on two VMs. The remaining five virtual machines are used for load balancing, statistics, the proxy site on port 80, torrent storage and for the controller. In total the VMs use 182 GB of RAM and 94 CPU cores. The total storage capacity is 620 GB. One interesting aspect of The Pirate Bay is that all virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers. "Moving to the cloud lets TPB move from country to country, crossing borders seamlessly without downtime. All the servers don't even have to be hosted with the same provider, or even on the same continent." All traffic goes through the load balancer, which masks what the other VMs are doing. This also means that none of the IP-addresses of the cloud hosting providers are publicly linked to TPB. For now, the most vulnerable spot appears to be the site's domain. Just last year TPB burnt through five separate domain names due to takedown threats from registrars. But then again, this doesn't appear to be much of a concern for TPB as the operators have dozens of alternative domain names standing by.
I mean, 620 GB of storage isn't much, but I'm sure some people would want to RAID it anyway. Although I've heard that Police RAID only works with write-only storage...
Ezekiel 23:20
So, you're like the last person in the world to understand that TPB holds no content, just pointers to content?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Raids only make sites become raid-proof. Just as monitoring creates encryption and oppression creates rebellion.
But of course one cannot fight the core problem when the core problem is oneself.
(RIAA, MPAA and various law enforcement agencies not counting as "people").
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Both. You can make money and have the lulz...
When you click the search box it often triggers a popup ad. I would imagine that ad sees hundreds of millions of impressions per month, which would translate to hundreds of thousands of dollars in monthly revenue at an average of $1 per 1000 impressions.
There are also some regular ads on the site. They could easily be making more than $10 million a year in ad revenue.
Their traffic is up that much?!
I imagine it has a lot to do with more and more countries coming online with broadband in recent years--countries where people often don't have any legal options to purchase movies, or the money to purchase them even if they did.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
The "keys to the kingdom" point to virtual machines that can be rehosted faster than the raider can work the legal system in multiple countries to get to the next level of servers after raiding the load balancer. The point is not that they can prevent raids but that any raids will be ineffective at shutting them down for more than a few minutes. That effectively discourages raids as a strategy as they are expensive and ineffective.
Some people out there have motivations other than "money" and "lulz".
Things like "respect of one's peers", "ideology", "non-conformism" or even "the challenge of doing something hard no one else can do", can make some people take quite large risks.
Single points of failure aren't that much of a factor in virtual machines. If the hardware goes down, the VM is restarted elsewhere. If the machine dies, you copy it from backup... or have a copy on standby (which can be and often is the same thing). After all, there aren't many changes on a worker machine like that.
Not to forget, nothing stops you from clustering that shit from Microsoft's to Amazon's cloud.
Considering that I've never found TPB to be down when I needed it and haven't heard many complaints in that direction, I'd say their system works pretty well for them.
Yeah, but who would want to advertise on a site frequented almost exclusively by cheapskates who would rather steal content than pay for it? Even if they found your ad compelling, they're way more likely to steal your product than buy it.
That's perhaps part of it, but the main reason is that TPB is still the best place to get new stuff. I always download all new TV-series there, except netflix-series that I can get on... netflix.
As for games, I recently wanted to buy a few games on stream, but they demanded a copy of my id because my card was issued in another country than the one I live in at the moment. Fine, goodbye. Downloaded the games at TPB instead.
It should not only be possible but also convenient to buy media. Netflix and GOG are great and get my money, other places that are less great and makes it difficult can keep their digital copies while I go browsing at the Pirate Bay.
Studies have consistently shown that people who pirate things like movies, albums, etc are also far more likely to purchase them as well. So, the people advertising on TPB are the ones smart enough to ignore the RIAA's and MPAA's misled war against their best customers.
Also, you can answer your own question for yourself by simply going to TPB and seeing what kind of ads they have.
Copying, downloading or illegally streaming, none of those constitute stealing. Nice try though.
Oh, and by the way, those cheapskates? Yeah not so much. Turns out there are a number of different reasons people resort to piracy to get what they want. Unsurprisingly, price really has very little to do with it. I'd link a bunch of articles for your dumb ass to read, but, yeah what's the point?
Most of the ads are for things that you can't pirate, like online casinos, free to play games, "dating" sites...
went legit half a decade ago?
According to many people, they have always been just as legit as Google or Bing.
They just provide more accurate search results for certain types of searches.
Yes, there are independant film makers out there, but without those box-office sales, we wouldn't have Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, or a slew of the other CGI-dependant movies with big-name actors/actresses.
Oh, the horror!
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Yup. I recently bought a game on a steam sale. For as little as I paid for it, the hassle of pirating it would not have been worth it.
On the other hand, apparently many parts of the game aren't actually working now due to a bad update. Of course, the advantage of Steam is that I'll probably get that update automatically within a few days. On the other hand, if I had obtained it from TPB I probably would be playing it now instead of waiting, since the pirated version would be an older known-good one (though obviously missing whatever was in that update).
I also saw a "# activations remaining" message when registering my CD key with the game, which wasn't terribly comforting. I suspect that Valve would take care of any actual issues down the road, but who knows, maybe in 10 years I'll end up stopping by TPB to get a crack for the game that I just bought.
Stuff like this is why there is piracy.
" but they demanded a copy of my id because my card was issued in another country than the one I live in at the moment"
Sounds like Steam was trying to prevent credit card fraud, most people think that is a good thing and it is not exactly a privacy concern since your id is tied to your credit card to start with.
but they demanded a copy of my id because my card was issued in another country than the one I live in at the moment.
You need to give them your name and address anyway for a credit card transaction, and you were being subject to fraud prevention. That's an excuse to pirate, not a reason.
If you watched the documentary (TPB: AFK) you'd know why. Most of them are pro-freedom. Their network engineer does it "for the challenge".
I would say sort of the opposite. It became the best place when pretty much every single one of its competitors was raided or threatened out of the business. I burned through a few I liked more before TPB was the only left.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Most musicians I know make money doing gigs (i.e. working for a living). Movies are generally profitable or not based on theatrical sales - a time when there are no quality online versions; sales after a theatrical run is complete rarely changes a flop to profitability.
Interestingly, there are troupes of actors travelling all over the country and world who make money night after night performing in venues all over the country side. It's called theater, and - interestingly - when you put a "star" in a show you don't even have to travel. Have you seen the sellouts for Neil Patrick Harris, or Patrick Stewart on Broadway? Even if you ignore the fact that people can still make money performing live, the top movies, since 1920 have *the theatrical receipts* often exceeding the production cost by a factor of 4. That's a margin even the stingiest of capitalists drools over. In fact, the top 50 theatrically grossing movies (which are mostly from the last 20 years) grossed no less than 775 Million dollars EACH, and only 7 of them cost more than 200 Million to make, with none more than 300 Million. It's probably okay not to worry too much about being able to feed the families of the poor movie executives, even if by some strange change in the copyright law they lost all rights to their films at the close of the production run.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
My reason not to give my ID, (even if it means paying for a service which can be taken free by showing an ID Pardus anyone???) is simply that I do not know when the database they use to store my ID will be either hacked by a script kiddie or raided by a foreign government. My domestic government already has full access to my person and data, there is no need to increase my accessibility (!)....
Colorado. Washington. (You're welcome.)
"The remaining five virtual machines are used for load balancing...."
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
Don't get me wrong, I hate the MAFIAA as much as the next guy, but people seem to forget about following the money.
Music is one beast that can thrive from independant distribution and marketing. It's relatively cheap to build your own recording studio and make a name for yourself on facebook.
Movies on the other hand, do take years and millions to make. The money comes up-front from a studio and the studio hopes (expects?) to make money off of ticket sales, merchandise, DVD/Blu-Ray, etc... Yes, there are independant film makers out there, but without those box-office sales, we wouldn't have Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, or a slew of the other CGI-dependant movies with big-name actors/actresses.
Would anybody mind sharing how we can get to this eutopian world where every multi-billion dollar produced movie can be made free to the unwashed masses? It's not like a movie can tour the countryside and get money from concert sales...
Make a kick-ass movie, I will likely buy a ticket. Make a decent movie, one that I really want to see but not at current ticket prices, I will wait for it a while. But not forever. If it does not show up on Netflix I might rent it, burn it, then watch it at my convenience, then toss the disk. If I really want to see it & missed it at the flicks due to time constraints, I will download it. If the entertainment industry wants me to pay, make it convenient, let me watch it how & when I want to, & keep the price point reasonable. $6.99 for On Demand is too much as I can rent it for less. They can make money this way, but they might have to let go of their old business models.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
So, you're like the last person in the world to understand that TPB holds no content, just pointers to content?
With TPB mainly running on magnet links, it's not even that it's a hash of pointers to content these days. Even the actual pointers have gone off-site, which reduces the bandwidth by 99%. My guess is TPB actually serves up more ads than content, if you count bytes.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Very bad examples here. In both cases of pharma and music, the up-front costs are vastly inflated because of the existence of "intellectual property" laws.
I'm talking about actual costs, not accounting games. It costs thousands of dollars to produce a record album, and I don't think anybody would really dispute this (maybe you can get people to work for free, but if you add up the hours and reasonable compensation it works out to something on that scale). If you factor in failed bands that were funded whose costs have to be recouped I'm sure the figure will be 10x higher.
With drugs the costs are in the tens to hundred of millions of dollars. Much of that goes to pay doctors to participate in clinical trials, but there are a lot of other costs as well. Hundreds of scientists are involved in the development and testing of a drug, and they are expensive to hire.
Now, some will argue if the cost is $100M, or $1B, or $10B. Few are going to argue that drugs are the sort of thing that a few people can develop in their kitchen (complete with supporting double-blind clinical trial data, and a robust manufacturing process that consistently turns out pills that work and are safe). If you don't want IP laws for drugs, then somebody has to spend that $100M+, and I think the real cost is closer to the $1B figure (factoring in the costs of drugs that are tested but turn out to not work - it isn't like somebody doing R&D can choose in advance to only research the stuff that works out).